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Are Shoppers Fairer?

By John Tierney March 22, 2010 6:04 pmMarch 22, 2010 6:04 pm

In my Findings column, I discuss a study in Science that found wide cultural variations in concepts of fairness. It was measured by observing people in 15 societies around the world participate in a two-player game in which one player, called the dictator, decided how much of the prize to share with the other.

When this game was played in Hamilton, a small town in Missouri, the dictators gave away nearly half the prize — a division that probably sounds fair to you, since it’s a typical result when the experiment is tried in industrialized societies. But in this new far-flung study, hunter-gatherers, foragers, pastoralists and subsistence farmers were much less willing to share the prize, apparently because they didn’t feel an obligation to someone they didn’t know. Given the strength of family obligations in these traditional communities, they may well have considered it unfair to their own family if they gave away a prize to a stranger instead of bringing it home to their relatives.

After controlling for a variety of factors, the researchers — an international team of 14 anthropologists, psychologists and economists — identified two crucial predictors. People were more likely to share the prize if they were members of a “world religion” like Christianity or Islam, and, most important, if they lived in a community with high “market integration,” meaning that people bought most or all of their food. The researchers, led by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia, suggest that participation in market transactions help establish norms of “fairness” toward strangers, and their conclusion was endorsed in a separate commentary in Science by Karla Hoff of the World Bank.

“I think that this is a very impressive study,” Dr. Hoff told me, noting that the results added to similar evidence from other traditional societies gathered earlier by Dr. Henrich and colleagues. In her commentary in Science, Dr. Hoff writes:

A society is not just a random group of people with a shared territory. It is a group that shares cognitive frames and social norms. We cannot know for certain how fairly our ancestors in foraging bands behaved in situations lacking relationship information, but Henrich et al. brings us a closer understanding by studying people in simple societies that may be very like those of our early ancestors. These findings call into question the standard assumption in economics that preferences are innate and stable, and suggests instead that cultural conditioning of the expression of human selfishness is a part of the process of economic development.

Dr. Hoff also mentions, in her commentary, a historical example of how norms of fairness contributed to economic growth:

It has been argued that Britain’s’ leadership in the Industrial Revolution — the onset of modern economic growth — depended on the unusual strength among European countries of its informal norms against opportunism in business. Although markets were highly competitive, businessmen displayed a high degree of class solidarity, defined as “sufficient trust in one another so that pairwise cooperative behavior was expected and maintained.” In this secure environment, unprecedented levels of cooperation occurred between individuals with commercial acumen and those with technical skills. The exceptional cheaters risked punishment in the form of the exclusion from social groups.

Here’s how Dr. Henrich sums it up:

Our findings suggest that the evolution of societal complexity, especially as it has occurred over the last 10 millennia, involved the selective spread of those norms and institutions that best facilitated successful exchange and interaction in socioeconomic spheres well beyond local networks of durable kin and reciprocity-based relationships.

Do markets and morality — as we like to definite fairness in modern societies — reinforce one another? Does shopping at Wal-Mart, as the fair-minded people in Missouri do, strengthen one’s tendency to follow the golden rule in dealing with strangers? I welcome your comments.

One more note: I didn’t have room in my column to list the rest of the researchers who worked with Dr. Henrich on this extraordinary experiment involving field work in some of the world’s most remote places. But let me give credit here to the co-authors:

Jean Ensminger of the California Institute of Technology; Richard McElreath of the University of California, Davis; Abigail Barr of Oxford; Clark Barrett of U.C.L.A, , Alexander Bolyanatz of the College of DuPage; Juan Camilo Cardenas, Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia; Michael Gurven, U.C., Santa Barbara; Edwins Gwako, Guilford College; Natalie Henrich of the Providence Health Care Research Institute in Vancouver; Carolyn Lesorogol of Washington University in St. Louis; Frank Marlowe of Florida State; David Tracer of the University of Colorado, and John Ziker of Boise State University.

Now, do you agree with their conclusions about the moral effects of shopping?

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About

John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. Now a columnist for the Science Times section, Tierney previously wrote columns for the Op-Ed page, the Metro section and the Times Magazine. Before that he covered science for magazines like Discover, Hippocrates and Science 86.

With your help, he's using TierneyLab to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society. The Lab's work is guided by two founding principles:

Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn't mean it's wrong.

But that's a good working theory.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, particularly from researchers with new findings. E-mail tierneylab@nytimes.com.